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Comment by sapper2 | Hacker News Reader

Good move aka burning bridges. If managed right, this will enhance the development and use of better technologies.

IIRC the German government stated that at least in the short to mid-term they'd offset the main part of the decrease in energy production with additional coal power plants.

I doubt that that's a good move...

Nuclear is the safest form of energy that we currently have. More people die from installing solar panels than deaths occurred in nuclear accidents: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener... .

>Nuclear is the safest form ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_accidents_by_coun...

"The nuclear industry says that new technology and oversight have made nuclear plants much safer, but 57 accidents have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Two thirds of these mishaps occurred in the US. The French Atomic Energy Agency (CEA) has concluded that technical innovation cannot eliminate the risk of human errors in nuclear plant operation. An interdisciplinary team from MIT have estimated that given the expected growth of nuclear power from 2005 – 2055, at least four serious nuclear power accidents would be expected in that period"

http://www.spp.nus.edu.sg/docs/policy-briefs/201101_RSU_Poli...

Nobody claimed that nuclear power was absolutely safe; only that it's a lot safer than the alternatives we have right now. You're arguing against a straw man.

very strange that ..

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster don't changed the statistics.

I've heard that argument before. I'm actually inclined to believe the general sentiment (in the sense that producing and burning most non-renewables, or building huge dams is disgusting). However, I'm highly skeptical that they are accurately tracking long term health effects of radiation poisoning.

I'm also highly sceptical of tracking reduced age expectancy due to atmospheric coal pollution.

How many people die from building and maintaining nuclear power plants?

Chernobyl accident .. cancer

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.22037/full

"Models predict that by 2065 about 16,000 (95% UI 3,400–72,000) cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 (95% UI 11,000–59,000) cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident, whereas several hundred million cancer cases are expected from other causes. Although these estimates are subject to considerable uncertainty, they provide an indication of the order of magnitude of the possible impact of the Chernobyl accident. It is unlikely that the cancer burden from the largest radiological accident to date could be detected by monitoring national cancer statistics. Indeed, results of analyses of time trends in cancer incidence and mortality in Europe do not, at present, indicate any increase in cancer rates—other than of thyroid cancer in the most contaminated regions—that can be clearly attributed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident."

The difference is, you can install a solar panel on your house.

A nuclear reactor is a high security area which is not open to the public.

You can apply this reasoning to anything, so what makes you think it necessarily applies to nuclear power? That is to say, by what reasoning do you argue that nuclear power itself isn't a 'better technology'? And better than what?

A technology that can - by the core physics behind it - make large parts of a country uninhabitable upon failure has no future. And is crazy for a small country like Japan.

Maybe it is better than coal. But Germany plans to replace them with renewable energy.

German politicians want to replace them with renewable energy. They have no realistic plan to do so. Meanwhile they will continue to import power with no regard for how it was generated. It's pandering and hypocrisy.

As for physics, how about the physics of an oil spill?

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